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People do not simply want to get from A to B. That is the biggest misconception about mobility. People choose their A and B according to their transport options. They cycle to the local supermarket, take the tram to the city centre and drive to the out of town shopping centre. People who regularly work from home move further away from their workplace.
We travel an average of 1.1 hours a day to reach all our different places of work, shopping, friends and leisure. This has remained roughly constant for centuries and is true for the average population of a country or city, but obviously not for each individual.
With the advent of faster and faster transport - from the carriage to the train to the car to the plane - our A and B have become further and further apart. A famous example is the construction of the high-speed train between Paris and Lyon, which has boosted commuting between these cities. And without aviation, the Canary Islands would not be a tourist attraction.
If we go faster, we go further. And if we stop going faster, we stop going further. Since the average car has stopped going faster since the turn of the century - about 45 km/h - the growth in per capita car mobility distances has stopped. Between 2005 and 2019 (before the Covid mobility dip), car mobility per inhabitant in the Netherlands even fell by 3%. The fact that car-kilometres per inhabitant still increased by 6% during this period is due to the lower average car occupancy rate.
The constant travel time combined with the constant car speed means that mobility per inhabitant is no longer increasing in wealthy countries. Except for air travel, which is even faster. The figure (below) shows the resulting mobility forecast to 2050 that I made for my book 'New mobility - beyond the car era'. However, most government forecasts do not take travel time and speed sufficiently into account and therefore predict an increase in per capita car mobility. This is not realistic.
For enthusiasts, here is an overview of international studies on constant travel time:
Yacov Zahavi, Federal Highway Administration (USA): 1974 and 1980
Geurt Hupkes, BREVER Law, PhD thesis University of Amsterdam: 1977
Cesare Marchetti, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis: 1994
Andreas Schafer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2000 and 2011
David Metz, Centre for Transport Studies, UCL: 2008 and 2020
I built on this in my book New mobility – beyond the car era (2017) and in the book chapter The transport-urbanisation dialectic (2021).
